Wednesday, August 15, 2012

DreamWeaver / Rejean Giguere

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Author:

Rejean Giguere lives in Canada. He has published two other
novels and four short story collections. For more, visit his website. www.rejeangiguere.com

Description:

The story
is a quest where the protagonist, Zeke Jackson, goes in search of his twin
sister who has been taken captive somewhere in Asian.

Appraisal:

After Zeke has exhausted all the “normal” channels to find his sister, he
receives a mysterious email and through it makes connection with a mystic
located in a rough area of the Bronx. From here on his journey becomes more
strange and challenging. Taking him to Africa, and costing him dearly in pain
and suffering. A fast read, the pacing and plot kept me engaged throughout, but
once I’d finished, I felt a little like I do after eating Chinese food. It was
enjoyable, but I was soon hungry again. I think because the story is purely
plot driven and little time is spent giving the characters depth, or explaining
the surroundings, or delving into why the strange things are taking place, or
why they work, or how they work.

I don’t read many short stories, so that may be the reason I was left
feeling there was more that could have been told in this tale. Still. I did
enjoy the few hours I spent in Mr. Giguere’s world.

3 comments:

The length of this is really interesting. It's too long to be a short story and too short to be a novel so it's a ... novella!? When print was king nobody wanted work at this length. I find I'm producing quite a lot of work that can't sustain a novel but is too complex for a short story. Do we think this sort of length will come back into vogue now that publication is easier to achieve? SF mags like Asimov's used to serialise stories of this length. I loved them.

I just had a conversation yesterday about this elsewhere, at least terminology. There isn't an official definition (different people/organizations vary a bit), but the general conclusion is a short story goes to about 7500 words, a novelette 7,500 to 17,500, and a novella from 17,500 to 40,000. Over that is a novel.

I've talked in previous reviews about how e-publishing makes works of different lengths practical where they aren't in the paper world except as part of a magazine or anthology. Amazon's Kindle Single program was started, IMO, to emphasize that fact. (Or at least that's one of the things they use to market them.) It allows a work to be its natural length rather than having to pad it to meet some arbitrary requirement.

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